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Port Exploreum

Education | Entertainment | Museum

A city with a story. A building, more than a century old, ready for its next purpose. And the creative team at Balance to help ideate and design an entire multi-floor museum at the historic property. It was a perfect collaboration of storytelling, hometown pride, and utilizing engaging interactive experiences to bring Port Washington's rich history to life and create Port Exploreum: a world-class museum that celebrates the town's maritime past through interactive discovery and hands-on learning.

The Balance team worked hand-in-hand with the museum's development team, collaborating on fundraising efforts and ideas, consulting with the Port Washington Historical Society on exhibit construction, and advising on the most efficient visitor flow and museum layout for each floor. Wanting each corner to be a new step into a fantastical world of interactivity and lead visitors' minds to wonder with each exhibit, Port Exploreum and Balance blended new and old by using technology to showcase amazing videos, photos, and stories from Port Washington's colorful past.

Projection Wall

To give museum guests a sense of what it is like to arrive and leave Port Washington's harbor on a fishing boat, Balance created an immersive projection wall. The immersive experience lets visitors experience what life may be like as an angler, experiencing the uncertainty of a storm, the relief of a safe harbor, and the complexity of living aboard a fishing vessel. They are also told stories about the historic port.

Incorporating live action footage, historical Port Washington photos, animation, visual effects, and an amazing integrated effects light show, guests are on board for a voyage of discovery. While out at sea, visitors learn more about Port Washington's storied history of fishing and the dangerous volatile conditions of Lake Michigan that often resulted in shipwrecks.

A DMX controller varies the lighting to match the adventure and immerses visitors in the experience by showcasing a daylight feel, lightning, or dark skies. The stunning visual experiences, entrancing videos, and colorful lighting experiences give visitors the illusion that they are under the open sky traveling through a terrifying storm. This engaging immersive experience allows even the most aquaphobic patrons get the full experience of being on the lake.

Dive Helmet

The creative team at Balance used the magic of interactive technology to transport guests to an underwater adventure. The Dive Helmet Interactive Experience takes guests on a virtual scuba dive deep into Lake Michigan and off the shores of Port Washington to discover and explore a shipwreck. No need to add water. Visitors simply put on the dive helmet and are immersed into the Great Lake waters to experience the sights and sounds, just as they would be on an actual dive.

Oral History Kiosk

The Port Washington Historical Society (PWHS) is known for their focus on blending new technologies and history to create edu-taining, interactive experiences that engage visitors while teaching them about the rich history of Port Washington. Continuing their long-standing partnership, PWHS looked to Balance Studios to develop a portable touchscreen kiosk exhibit that would appear at the Port Exploreum as well as travel to educate visitors in schools and their iconic lighthouse.

The Oral History Kiosk enhances the tradition of telling stories through an engaging touchscreen kiosk. Users are invited to hear stories from local residents and explore history through these videos and historic images. The custom content management system allows the admin to upload content at any time from any location. In addition to controlling all of the content found on the touchscreen, the kiosk has offline capabilities where the admin can sync new content before traveling to a location without dedicated Internet.

Ozaukee Press Newspaper Table

Multi-Gestural Table Application

The Newspaper Multi-Gestural Table engages patrons through an incredible look at historical documents, photographs, and newspaper articles. Multiple guests can interact at once using one of the table's four quadrants and can select from various news topics: Business, Headline News, In-Depth Features, Local News, People in the News, and Special Features.

Visitors can learn about the heartbreaking losses of the Great Flood of 1924, the harrowing rescue of the Niagra, the joys of celebrating Fish Day, and so much more. Utilizing a customized content management system (CMS), curators at the Port Washington Historical Society can edit content themselves, to add or remove stories, upload new photos and videos, and create different and unique experiences for patrons' future visits to the Exploreum.

Watershed Table

When curators at Port Exploreum learned that there was an increase of school groups wanting to know more about the water quality of Lake Michigan, they partnered with the creative team at Balance to ideate a way to make the complex topic of the local watershed, and its impact on the community, fun and accessible. Working directly with scientists to learn the impacts on Lake Michigan and the area's watershed, Balance created the Watershed Interactive Multi-Gestural Table, an interactive game that an entire school group can enjoy at one time.

This quadrant-concept game lets four small teams of students interact with each of the four areas: industrial, agriculture, urban, and suburban living. As a team selects each option, the 3D model of the watershed updates to reflect their choices, indicating how their land usage decisions impact the watershed, both positively or negatively. Once an area is completed, a summary of the choices selected and the resulting overall impact displays for students to review.

The Watershed Interactive is used by area schools during Love Your Lake Day and its content pairs with local school curriculum for a fun tool to connect education and play.

Fish Daze

Volumetric Augmented Reality Application

Creating fun is easy work for the innovators at Balance and, knowing that augmented reality (AR) is an effective tool to aid in learning and education, the team proposed Fish Daze: a game that would teach and entertain museum guests. Combining 3D animation and gaming mechanics with their proprietary volumetric AR platform, ARena, Fish Daze is a 4-level, edu-tainment gaming system that challenges players to sort fish based on their species: sport fish, invasive fish, or pollution.

One or two players can play and visitors use their hands to grab the digital fish and place them into the correct bins. Guests have so much fun and the museum reaches its ultimate goal which is to educate its many visitors about lake ecology and the fish species that are native to the Great Lake of Lake Michigan. Now that's catching something worth keeping.

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Lake Michigan Table

One of many interactive exhibits designed to edu-tain guests at Port Exploreum, the Balance team incorporated an incredible amount of information about Lake Michigan to develop this first-of-its-kind touchscreen experience. A complex project, the team customized this immersive interactive into the shape of Lake Michigan, not an easy task with so much complex programming required. Attracted to the unique shape of the table, guests soon discover that the standard wood and fiber glass display is actually a super-cool interactive, dimensional, multi-gestural, multi-user experience that blends projection and sensor technology with real-time data feeds.

During the Lake Michigan Table experience, guests learn thousands of facts about the great inland sea–from real-time images and information about ships currently traveling, to views of shipwrecks throughout the years, to real time live feeds of the lake's air temperature, wind patterns, wave height, and cloud cover. They can also select one of five zones, the shipping ports, around the Lake Michigan Table: Green Bay to Door County, Ludington to the Straits of Mackinaw, Milwaukee to Chicago, Port Washington to Manitowoc, and Southwest Michigan. Users even learn about pirates on the Great Lake, ferry travel, and a proposed marine sanctuary.

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Sailing Touchscreen Kiosk

The Balance team incorporated videos from Sail America, US Sailing, and Sailing Magazine to show visitors the six aspects of sailing, including sailing into the wind, sailing with the wind, saving a sailor who falls overboard, and more. Museum guests use a touchscreen application that has a custom attract screen to engage passers-by so they stop and interact. By tapping the screen, visitors choose the video clip they wish to view and learn more about the many aspects of sailing on the Great Lakes.

Lake Ecology Touchscreen

The Lake Ecology Touchscreen Kiosk tests visitors' knowledge in this 2D animated interactive quiz about Lake Michigan's ecosystem hosted by friendly fish host, Doc Salmon. Throughout the bubbling experience, the friendly fish-guide teaches about water quality, the preservation of Lake Michigan, and how the fish population has changed throughout the years. Guests are asked questions and can choose the difficulty of their 10-question quiz: easy, hard, or science curriculum level and see how they score about their knowledge of the fish population and how it effects lake ecology and water quality.

Captain & Boat Touchscreen

The Balance-created, animated Captain and Boat Interactive Touchscreen Application introduces museum guests to three captains: the schooner captain, the sailboat captain, and the fishing boat captain, and their three types of boats. Visitors match the captain to the correct boat and then the learning begins as the experience brings guests to an interactive boat screen.

There, boats appear in full, photo-real, 3D with several hot spots, or touch points, where patrons can explore areas of the boats at their own pace. At each hot spot, the captain himself leads the virtual exploration and explains the various parts of his watercraft.

The Idea

Transform an old building in the heart of Port Washington into the Port Exploreum, full of interactive learning, state-of-the-art technology, and engaging exhibits to tell the rich history of Port Washington, its maritime past, and the Great Lake it borders.

Services

It was all hands on deck as our entire crew played an integral role to create a truly world-class institution. From the concept, design, and development of exhibits, to advising on fundraising and helping with the museum layout, it was the ultimate collaboration with museum leaders, the historical society, and our creative teams. Using interactive approaches that seamlessly blended the past and present was an engaging way to tell this city's rich history.

The Result

The small town museum made a big splash with some of the most innovative technologies around every corner.

“Imagine a small town history museum…. Are you thinking of an old dank building stuffed with exhibits that don’t connect with you? And of course, it would have an unusual smell. That was the last thing we wanted to create at the Port Exploreum.

Now imagine sailing across Lake Michigan on the deck of an 1880 3-mast Great Lake Schooner, or experience being a member of a dive team exploring shipwrecks off our shores. Visualize learning about the ecology of Lake Michigan through an augmented reality game that places you in a competition to identify sport fish, invasive species and man-made threats.

That not enough? Also learn the techniques of sailing, as well as how 3 different vessels have navigated the waters of the lake. The Port Exploreum is not just about our maritime heritage, but it also captures the history of the Port Washington area through story-telling that connects the past to the future via a multi-gestural table. Using text, images and videos, we engage young and old alike and give them a glimpse into life in Port Washington through the years.

Creating an environment of joyful learning and hands-on exploration was our mission; Balance Studio’s innovation, creativity and brilliance made this possible. Their team was a delight to work with, and they helped insure our opening within budget and on schedule. Our experiences with them were so positive that we have continued on with them on the next phase of introducing new and exciting technology to the Port Exploreum with our Lake Michigan Table.”

~ Wayne Chrusciel, Executive Director & Bill Moren, Board Chair – Port Exploreum